The Orange Grove: Bring Ahmadinejad to justice

Genocide does not happen overnight. It is a long, meticulous process that requires persistent thought conditioning. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been engaged in that process since becoming president of Iran in 2005. He has consistently used his bully pulpit to convince audiences that Israel must be liquidated. For this, along with his supporting actions, he must be brought to justice for incitement to genocide and crimes against humanity.

His infamous October 2005 exhortation that Israel should be "wiped off the map" may have garnered the most press coverage, but Ahmadinejad's subsequent inflammatory statements have been equally effective at persuading the Muslim world to visualize a Middle East cleared of Israeli Jews.

Not only has he regularly urged and prophesied their elimination, but he has variously referred to Israeli Jews as animals, barbarians and mass murderers. Ahmadinejad has also methodically chipped away at perhaps the most imposing moral and ethical bulwark against the launch of another Jewish genocide - the existence of the Holocaust.

Were Ahmadinejad's words the sole problem, perhaps the rest of the world could simply tune out his genocidal rants. But those words have been uttered within the context of Iran's longstanding eliminationist policy toward Israel and Iran's financial and other support of radical Islamist terrorist groups bent on destroying the Jewish state, including Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

In fact, Ahmadinejad's rhetoric can be tied to his support of the terrorists. In the summer of 2006, as Hezbollah was firing thousands of rockets onto innocent Israeli civilians at the height of the Israeli-Hezbollah War, Ahmadinejad, who sponsored this violence, stated that the "real cure for the [Lebanon] conflict is the elimination of the Zionist Regime." This advocacy, when linked to the attacks on civilians by proxy, makes Ahmadinejad liable for crimes against humanity.

Then there is the matter of Iran's nuclear ambitions, which pose a direct threat to Israel. Although a recent U.S. government National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, recent documents submitted to the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency suggest otherwise. Still, the fact remains that constructing a warhead is the easiest and quickest step in creating nuclear weapons. Tehran, according to Henry Kissinger and other experts, has accelerated its production of fissile material and increased the range of its missiles, much more difficult hurdles to overcome in the nuclear weapon production process.

Given the totality of circumstances, legal precedent from Nuremberg and the Rwandan genocide prosecutions teaches that Ahmadinejad's urgings to destroy Israel could be charged as direct and public incitement to commit genocide and crimes against humanity. The case could be heard by the International Criminal Court upon referral from the U.N. Security Council.

If indicted by the Hague-based ICC, Ahmadinejad would risk possible arrest and surrender to the Netherlands if he ventured from Iran. At the very least, an ICC indictment would further marginalize him and confirm his status as an international pariah.

Some may object that incitement charges are premature in the absence of actual mass atrocity. But such shortsighted thinking would perpetually and needlessly confine incitement law, which should be used for deterring atrocities, rather than merely punishing them after they happen.

For the moment, Ahmadinejad's genocidal utterances have largely abated as he crows to the world about the conclusions in the National Intelligence Estimate. And so the shortsighted 24-hour news cycle lulls us into a false sense of security when we should be considering the bigger picture. Should we ignore this looming menace between sound bytes and simply wait until Iran has operable weapons of mass destruction?

Through the end of the past century, millions of victims were slaughtered after being dehumanized and targeted through long-term, calculated verbal attack campaigns. And the world stood by.

Let's try a different approach in the 21st century.

WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Letters to the Editor: E-mail to letters@ocregister.com.
Please provide your name, city and telephone number (telephone numbers will not be published).
Letters of about 200 words or videos of 30-seconds
each will be given preference. Letters will be edited for length, grammar and clarity.

User Agreement

Keep it civil and stay on topic. No profanity, vulgarity, racial
slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about
tragedies will be blocked. By posting your comment, you agree to
allow Orange County Register Communications, Inc. the right to
republish your name and comment in additional Register publications
without any notification or payment.